2 page Case Study - Posted 11/11/2007

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Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Denmark

Danish Ministry Saves U.S.$500,000 on Deployment, Speeds Updates by 75 Percent

The Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Denmark needs increasingly effective and cost-effective ways to manage a growing technology infrastructure. Its solution: Microsoft® System Center Configuration Manager 2007. The solution is enabling the Ministry to save almost U.S.$500,000 in labor and expenses to send personnel worldwide to deploy Windows Vista®, to cut hundreds of hours off deployment time, and to speed software updates by 75 percent.

Business Needs

The number of locations that the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Denmark operates has increased 35 percent since 2000, as the Ministry has added embassies and consulates to promote Denmark’s interests outside of traditional diplomatic centers.

More locations mean more computer servers—the Ministry now maintains 400 servers—since offices have to operate as independently as possible. Bandwidth to many locations is limited; many remote locations can only be served by relatively low-bandwidth satellite links. And none of the embassies or consulates boasts on-staff technical personnel. That means those computer servers need to operate as flawlessly as possible.

The number of workstations has remained constant at around 3,000. The Ministry has wanted to add laptop computers to give its diplomats access to the network from areas increasingly inhospitable to desktops. But without an effective way to help ensure network security against constantly reconnecting machines that can inadvertently introduce malicious software, the Ministry has been unable to take advantage of laptops.

Making matters more challenging, the Ministry has operated with a technical staff of just three people, despite the fast-growing infrastructure. As the Ministry adopts needed enhancements such as new desktop operating systems and software, it has to do so in ways that don’t disrupt continuing operations—and that don’t incur major expenses to fly personnel to locations around the world.

Solution

To address these concerns, the Ministry is standardizing a variety of systems management functions—from operating system deployment to software distribution, updates, and asset intelligence, for both server computers and desktops—on Microsoft® System Center Configuration Manager 2007, the successor to the Microsoft Systems Management Server 2003 software that it adopted a few years ago. It’s implementing System Center Configuration Manager with the support of Microsoft Gold Certified Solution Provider Globeteam.

Configuration Manger gives us unified management of our infrastructure. We use one set of reports, one set of tools for the entire environment. It’s faster, simpler, more cost-effective. Bjørn Lysholm Jensen Special Advisor, IT Department, Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Denmark

One of the key features that the Ministry will use to manage operating system distribution and software updates to servers and desktops is the maintenance window capability of System Center Configuration Manager. Maintenance windows allow the Ministry’s IT staff to control when software is pushed out to each location—an important consideration in managing a global infrastructure, in which some offices are invariably closed while others are open, and in which local customs often dictate varying operating schedules. Similarly, the new driver library has allowed the Ministry to consolidate its drivers into a single structure to reduce complexity and reduce the possibility for error. “The driver library makes it much easier to control the drivers available for use across the enterprise,” says Bjørn Lysholm Jensen, Special Advisor to the Ministry’s IT Department.

The Ministry is now in the midst of an upgrade of its desktop computers to the Windows Vista® operating system, and System Center Configuration Manager is an integral part of that process. “We wouldn’t have thought of moving to Windows Vista without Configuration Manager,” says Jensen.

The Windows Vista deployment depends in part on the use of the System Center Configuration Manager Copy Package Wizard, which enables Jensen to easily assign sites to existing deployment packages, reducing the time needed to manage deployment.

The asset intelligence capability of System Center Configuration Manager catalogs and reports not only on the hardware and software deployed by the Ministry, but also on how that software is actually used, giving Jensen and his colleagues a better understanding of their environment and of the appropriate level of software licenses it needs to fund.

The Ministry is also using System Center Configuration Manager in conjunction with other System Center products. For example, a planned upgrade to Microsoft System Center Operations Manager 2007 will enable the Ministry to monitor and troubleshoot its System Center Configuration Manager environment for maximum effectiveness.

Benefits

“The main thing for us in IT is to get control of the network,” says Jensen. “One of the great things about System Center Configuration Manager is that it gives us that control—and it does what people thought couldn’t be done. We can easily create reports to answer questions about our infrastructure, allowing us to more effectively support the Ministry’s objectives. For example, do we want to distribute DVDs for education? We can quickly find out how many of our desktops have DVD drives, telling us whether the idea is practical.”

Managing both servers and desktops with a single tool—System Center Configuration Manager—is another big benefit, according to Jensen.

“Configuration Manger gives us unified management of our infrastructure,” he says. “We use one set of reports, one set of tools for the entire environment. It’s faster, simpler, more cost-effective. It puts all the technologies, such as Software Update Services, into a single, integrated solution, so everything we do can be handled consistently. Monthly updates will be deployed 75 percent faster, taking just one day to implement.”

Jensen and the Ministry are seeing big savings of time and money from System Center Configuration Manager. Deploying Windows Vista without System Center Configuration Manager might have cost more than U.S.$500,000 in labor and expenses to send personnel to locations worldwide, Jensen estimates.

With System Center Configuration Manager, the Ministry will save most if not all of that expense. The Task Sequencer eliminates the need to babysit software deployments that can take five or six hours per machine, and the Copy Package Wizard will likely save 200 hours in deployment labor.

Jensen also envisions using System Center Configuration Manager to expedite the deployment of the Windows Server® 2008 operating system.

For users, meanwhile, perhaps the biggest impact of System Center Configuration Manager will be the ability to include laptops into the environment while boosting security through features such as Network Access Protection, which quarantines machines, remediates them with appropriate software updates to ensure conformance with network policy, and then permits their access to the network.

Armed with laptops in remote regions where desktop machines are impractical, Danish diplomats will be more effective—thanks, in part, to System Center Configuration Manager.